Twitter suspends 70 pro-Bloomberg accounts in US

Washington, Feb 22 (IANS) Twitter has suspended 70 accounts in the US that were posting pro-Michael Bloomberg content for allegedly violating its online policies.

According to a report in The Los Angeles Times on Friday, the Democratic Party contender’s campaign has deployed a large number of Twitter accounts to push out identical messages in the US presidential election this year.

“We have taken enforcement action on a group of accounts for violating our rules against platform manipulation and spam,” a Twitter spokesperson was quoted as saying.

The Bloomberg campaign has allegedly hired hundreds of temporary employees to pump out campaign messages through Facebook, Twitter and Instagram.

Twitter said some of the account suspensions will be permanent.

Earlier, a video posted by Bloomberg left Facebook and Twitter divided on whether it violates their policies.

While Twitter said the video would be labelled as manipulated media under the platform’s new deepfakes policy, Facebook said the same video would not violate the platform’s deepfakes rules.

Earlier this month, Facebook, Twitter and Google-owned YouTube refused to pull down an edited video posted by US President Donald Trump that showed House Speaker Nancy Pelosi ripping up a copy of the former’s State of the Union address.